Yes, I said it. You. Me. That guy over there. The really successful businessperson. That super gorgeous influencer with the perfect ship-lapped living room on Instagram. They have all, at one time, failed at something.

By this time, most of you are in the throes of your New Years Resolutions....and many of you have possibly made "paying off debt" or "getting your finances in order" your focus for 2018.

The problem with most resolutions and the reason why most of them fail to stick is people come across a failure, either large or small, and use that as their reason to quit.

Financial fitness is, most definitely, a LIFESTYLE change....not just a money diet. And with any major lifestyle change there are going to be parts of the road along the way that are under major construction, rocky as shit, or full of tolls you weren't expecting (kind of think of the road as every major highway in Illinois. There you go).

However, when driving....things can go bad. Flat tires. You can run out of gas. You can get stuck in horrible traffic. You can rear end the guy in front of you (but not because you were looking for Hamilton on Spotify. Nope. Not because that was happening).

You don't just QUIT DRIVING forever. You learn from your mistakes and make pivots to improve your driving....or your workouts...or cleanliness...or whatever!

You, my friend, will be a BIG.FAT.FAILURE. at some point.

I've had points in our debt-free journey (a journey that never seems to freaking end. Kind of like every Lord of the Rings movie) where I've accidently forgotten a bill, where I've oopsied and paid a bill twice, where I couldn't book work to save my life, and where I took on jobs that were so wrong for me that I can blame absolutely nothing outside of abject stupidity for taking them on.

I have taken my turn on the wheel o' failure. And it sucks. But, it's not like I'm going to hop on Facebook and say "Hey friends. I can't book work to save my life and mortgage is due! I suck!" Would that be keeping it real? Uh....yeah! Of course!

No one keeps it REAL real. Seriously. No one wants to follow a failure.

We are taught to avoid failure. We are shown, via carefully curated social media pages, that no one ever fails, ever missteps, and ever looks anything less than stunning. We are taught to spin flaws into followers.

I'm here to be real with you. Upon taking on a debt-free, financial fitness journey....you are going to fail at some point. At some point you are going to want to chuck your notebook across the room and say "eff this" because it's hard and all you want to do is go shopping and pick up some take-out. There will be days you will spend too much. There will be times you'll completely space on the cable bill.

Because you are human. And humans fail.

But humans also succeed. They also take failures, take the lessons, apply them and use it to propel themselves to an eventual end. Whether that end is being so used to zero-based budgeting that it becomes second nature or the end is being completely debt free. Failure upon failure builds a tower to a successful resolution.

So fail on, brothers and sisters.Just make sure you are applying the lessons you learn from the failure and never make the same mistake twice.

We could look at the paltry amount we paid off in 2017 (under $20,000 compared with over $30,000 in 2018) and be pissed at ourselves. But, we could also realize that we made concious decisions to place our money into certain spaces. We were intentional. And right now, I'm okay with that. I'm not seeing intentionality as a failure, but I am sure going to learn from 2017 just the same.